February 2008 - Posts

Back home now, and I have a moment to get the photos downloaded from my camera and
uploaded to my blog. Next time I'll take my SD card reader with me.

As you can see, registration was quite busy. I heard that there were 4000 people there,
but didn't count them myself. The long lines delayed the keynote by about an hour:

Douglas McDowell and I snuck into the press area. Well, he was officially press (SQL
Server Magazine), but I wasn't - still I took more notes than most of the other pressies
there.

The main screen was huge, and 3D. We estimated about 80' wide and 20' tall. When no
slides were on the screen, there was a spinning 3D Earth enclosed in curley brackets.
Hey, what about VB?

After the keynote, there was a short walk to the LA convention center, where the breakout
sessions, chalk-talks, exhibitor area, etc. Fortunately, we had these interpretive
dancers along the way to keep us from getting lost.

The line to lunch was too long, so we ducked inside to check out the exhibitor area.

After I turned in my evaluation form, I picked up the attendee bag, which had
lots of goodies, including a hard-bound, coffee-table style book called "Heroes Happen
Here" which contains IT heroes from all around the world, photographed by Carolyn
Jones. And yes, I got my book signed!

In this, my first post of (hopefully) several today, I'm sitting in the keynote session
(next to Douglas
McDowell), listening to Tom
Brokaw warm up the audience. What a nice surprise. It definitely stopped all the
geeks in their tracks, to listen to his wise words, gathered from years of experience
in all matters mankind.

I loved his opening line "I'm not here to write code, or wire this room". He did,
however, wax poetic on the future of technology, the spirit and energy of the types
of people who will drive it, and how we must handle it to get their safely."

Some of his quotes during the keynote (some paraphrasing):

"The test or our place in this world is not yet complete. We don't want to become
Easter Island or the Mayan civilization. The use of this technology is not just a
virtual experience. If we develop capacity and leave out common sense, what then is
the reward to each of us, collectively or individually? If speed overruns reason,
what else gets trampled?"

"We will not solve climate change by hitting backspace. It will do us little good
to wire the world if we short circuit our consciousness, our souls and if we don't
use this technology to advance mankind."

"When I left Nightly News I said that I'm not only going to spend my time at suites
in the four seasons ... but to spend time in the trenches to meet people who make
a difference"

"One day I woke up in Pakistan in a packing container with Americans who had been
there for six months, trying to assess medical and health needs. When they hiked out,
they put their hands on the keyboard and distilled what they had learned ... and in
so doing, made a big impression ... of those of us in the West who have so much, while
they (people in Pakistan) have so little."

"This technology takes a guiding hand, an imaginative approach, and a hope ..."

"We have the opportunity to become the next, greatest generation."

Steve
Ballmer came on stage next to thank the many platinum sponsors, and discuss how
"Dynamic IT" can help manage complexity and achieve agility (especially in the realm
software development)

I heard the term "Agile" about 10 times in the span of 3 minutes. More to come ...

Time flies. It's been a year since Dr. Gray, a Microsoft research fellow and Turing
Award-winner, went missing while
sailing off San Francisco. A year ago, at Boise Code Camp 2.0, I hosted a session
on finding Jim
Gray, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Now, a year after Dr. Gray went missing, the Association
of Computing Machinery (the organization that holds the Turing Awards), the IEEE
Computer Society and the University of California-Berkeley have joined to announce
a tribute to Gray, planned for May 31 at the UC Berkeley campus. Jim Gray attended
UC Berkeley from 1961 to 1969 and earned the school's very first Ph.D. in computer
science. Fittingly enough, the tribute will also feature technical sessions for registered
participants.

I know. I know. This doesn't sound like a very interesting post, but it saved me time,
and hopefully it can save you some too.

When you install Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft creates a "Visual Studio 2008 Command
Prompt" shortcut, under that program group.

I like to take this shortcut and drop it on my Quick Launch toolbar:

The problem is that when you install the Team Foundation Server Power Tools (or other
new command line utilities) you need to put them in the path.

Well, if you look at the file the shortcut calls, it's vcvarsall.bat, but don't
bother editing that file because it calls vcvars32.bat, but don't bother editing
that file, because it calls vsvars32.bat. If you go ahead and edit that file,
you can find where the PATH is getting set, and add the Power Tools path to it: